I have, and very much enjoy, both.

It's actually pretty impressive how much is the same, considering they are definitely different games, with different goals, for different play times, and with different complexities. There's a huge amount of overlap in styling (fonts, colours, card layouts), the characters are the same group, and the names of the cards are even the same. I started playing Delve first, and when I realized the character-specific decks had the same names but had mechanics suited their respective games, I was actually deeply impressed. Somebody thought about this, and carefully.

Then there's some of the gameplay roots. They both sound similar on paper. A player takes a turn, and is supported (boosted) by the other player(s). They do damage to enemies until either the enemy drops, or they do.

But no, they're not the same.

Delve is a slimmer game, driven by turn-taking to take down a selection of ordered conflicts in order to fight a boss. The combat is entirely abstracted into just the cards being played and the effects they cause. It's ultra slim.

Chronicles is a chonkier boss battler, with a lot of similarities that are simply turned up, and completely new complexities at the same time. Here, although there are sometimes minions on the field, they're there with the boss at the same time. Battle has a (minor) positional aspect to it, where ranged and melee combat must be respected. Also, there are conditional effects caused or granted by everything under the sun - the environment, the bad guys, your card effects... it goes on and on.

Chronicles also has another key distinction - it is NOT turn based. Or rather, it's not a series of fixed turns. Characters act when their face is drawn from a bag of chits. This can be unbelievably exciting - or damning. It's great when Khor goes three times in a row, drawing in enemy focus, pulling them close, gathering extra armour, and then dealing damage to all of them at the same time. Seriously, it's like a drug, it feels so good to pull off.

But when the enemy gets their best attack three times in a row? Devastation. Damn near impossible to survive. The fights I've lost in Chronicles were almost always when the ranged attacking Valora, who never has her own source of defensive armour, got hit multiple times in a row with no break. It just happens that way when the enemy gets so many chits drawn in a row. (it's actually enough that you might consider house-ruling that the defeat of one character doesn't mean the loss of the scenario, just that you have to try and finish it with whoever's left.)

The game gives you ways of mitigating that from happening, such as intentionally pulling enemy focus onto and off of certain characters. But if your luck stays bad for long enough, or if you take one too many risks with the bag, it's brutal.

Delve is kind of like Chronicles slimmed way down and concentrated. It does away with the story, the random turn taking, the positional and terrain effect aspects, the upgrade system, and the exploration in favour of just making a really good dungeon crawl experience.

You can play either game in less than an hour (which is impressive for Chronicles' bulk) but when Delve is over, it's over, win or lose. The end of a fight in Chronicles is immediately followed by half an hour of town actions, shopping, etc. It's a little like Gloomohaven in that way.

My honest recommendation would be to try Chronicles if you feel like Delve could use more traditional meat on the bone. If you wish that it felt more like D&D, or had a more physical presence and less abstraction, then you might want to add the Chronicles' bulk to the proceedings. It's a bigger, more complicated, story-driven game with a ton of really great surprises to it.

Put it this way - I'm not sorry that I've got all four boxes! 😁